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Friday, June 19, 2015

Full confession: I have spent half an hour watching Mr.
Bean, because there’s nothing for it, there’s no sandbox deep enough to bury my
head, the truth is as blinding as it is numbing. “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the
world,” and what can I do about it? Precious little.

Again, a kid had too much time on his hands, too little to
do, began brooding about the soon-to-be-disappeared white race, and got it into
his head to grab a gun, go and sit for an hour in a Bible study group, and then
kill nine people.

As always, it’s the details. That hour that he spent—what
was he thinking? Was he studying the group? Was he identifying which people he
would kill first? Which he would spare? Was he wrestling with his conscience?
Or was he gathering up the “courage” to act?

As always, it’s the reaction. An Episcopal bishop writes
that the attack wrote that the attack was “unimaginable.” Was it? Wasn’t it
almost predictable, since insane attacks have now happened in movie theaters,
elementary schools, and now Bible study groups in churches. Oh, and pretty much
anybody in the black community can tell you: There’s a long history of
attacking and often torching the black churches. The liberals are saying that
this is terrorism, as much as a Muslim planting bombs at the marathon in Boston
was terrorism. The gun-loving crazies are…well, I don’t know what they are
saying because, guess what? So polarized have we become that neither side is
listening to the other, which means that nothing will ever get done, because
the money is with the guns, and anyway, they’re out there, and so how do you
lure the genie back into the bottle?

As, always, it’s not the individual. Although it will be painted
that way—this “terrible tragedy” had nothing to do with systemic racism, failed
educational systems, fractured society, warped values, and lax gun laws. No—it
was an isolated incident, regrettable but not indicative of anything that need
be done, except perhaps to be more vigilant.

And does anyone really think that our police departments are
not waging a war against black people? Because, in 2006, the FBI published a
paper entitled “White
Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement.” Who knew? And by the way,
even I could be a white supremacist, since I could be cloaked in what I now
know is a “ghost skin,” a term referring to a white supremacist passing as a
liberal, or at least not as a crazy.

Then, of course, there’s the rest of the world to consider,
since absolutely everybody is the developed world is convinced that we are
bloodthirsty savages, and who’s to say they’re not right? Consider the case of Stefan
Arzberger, the first violinist of the Leipzig Quartet, who went out after a
concert, met and took a transsexual prostitute to his hotel in New York City,
got rolled, and, according to him, was drugged. So what happened? At 8 in the
morning, he was naked and roaming the halls of the hotel, pounding on doors. An
older woman opened the door, and the violinist nearly killed her. So she is
suing him, he is claiming that he was the victim of a drugging and a robbery,
and the entire classical music world is scratching its head. Oh, and making
comments like this:

The problem of “drugging” other people at a bar in order
to rape, rob or murder them is, fortunately for the rest of the world, a rather
unique and peculiar American reality, more or less unknown and unheard of in
Europe, Japan and in other developed countries.

See more at:
http://slippedisc.com/2015/06/new-york-times-awakes-to-a-crime-on-its-doorstep/#sthash.Jq5ofyJn.dpuf

Well, it’s all familiar ground: People who are not classical
musicians or lovers of classical music are questioning why no one can believe
that a violinist would be roaming the halls naked at 8 AM attacking older
ladies unless drugged. Just because he plays the violin, does he get a free
pass? Evidently not, since he is still in New York, facing huge legal bills—he
may have to sell one of his violins to get out from under them—and his string
quartet has been scrambling to find other violinists to replace him. Oh, and
they got into a nasty scrap when they substituted Arzberger but neglected to
tell Wigmore
Hall.

So we have just a nice normal 21-year old who shot nine
black people, and we have a drug-maybe-crazed violinist running very amok through
the halls of his hotel, very much seeking “whom he may devour,” and why do I
feel it’s my job to do anything about it? Although I now know, thanks to the
comments section of the article sited above, that most likely it wasn’t a date
rape drug, but rather a bath salts drug which apparently acts as a stimulant,
and which anway would be self-induced, and not slipped into Arzberger’s drink.

And that means I should Google it, since it’s vital to tell
you all, my legions of readers, exactly what it is, the dangers of it, and
precisely why you shouldn’t experiment with it. And in fact, I have done just that,
and can tell you not to bother running to your bathroom to dispose of the
offending item, since the ordinary bath salts are just bath salts. But since
they were sold at times as real bath salts, the name stuck. Anyway, they are
apparently the fourth most consumed drugs in the nightclubs. Oh—and they can’t
be detected in urine tests.

So it’s a melancholy business—and who can tell when it will
finish? But here’s a start: Beware of the white dude in your black Bible group,
and think really hard before you open your door to naked violinists!

Life, Death and Iguanas

Life, Death…and Iguanas?Yes, that’s the title of an e-book available on Amazon / Kindle. It’s the story of a woman who took charge of her death, just as she had her life. Of a family that split, and then united. Of a man who decided to live. Oh, and there’s some great stuff about iguanas….Read the first chapter by clicking here!